Hashtag Matter is a production of Shonda Land Audio in partnership with I Heart Radio and an association with Wolf at the Door. This episode was brought to you in collaboration with One Up, a social justice coalition working to end police brutality, and there's two part documentary follow up to Hashtag Matter, will consider unexamined repercussions, joined by some of the nation's leading activists, historians, and thinkers. Maybe by contextualizing our past, we can better define our future, a future that includes an exciting new normal where we invest in resources that build safe communities and healthy kids. Listen up, your boy poo troll in the building, and this is context matters. If you haven't listened to the previous episode, I suggest you go back and listen before moving on here, because it provides incredibly important historical context that brings us to the present moment. I always say that I would love to live in a world where police are like pay phones. You know, we use them once upon a time, and now we understand them differently, and we've taken the phones into our own hands, quite literally, in our pockets. And that's what I feel like we need to do with the care and safety um that we have, we need to it needs to be brought into our communities. Kendrick Sampson, an actor and activists co founder of Build Power. Dr Molinadul always talks about you know how when she first moved to l A, she realized that every morning, all of these what we would call old heads, elders would come out and sit on the porch and it was like clockwork, seven o'clock every day or something like that, and she couldn't understand what was happening. And finally she asked, and she said, the elder said, that's when the kids go to school. That's their safety system, and they sit and they watch. We don't need cops. What I saw was a very beautiful, nurturing, airing system that worked. Nobody was gonna mess with these babies while the elders were watching. And there are systems like that that we can create. Even that's happening. I think in Baton Rouge, where there was a school where forty five dads got together and and um fights and suspensions and all of that went way way, way way way down because they knew they had people that they respected and their dads and such watching so and they did it in shifts. So and I'm not saying that everyday people need to take even more out of their time. We can have those resources. Those resources now are tied up in astronomical budgets, and those budgets are forty of all of the resources we have in our city budgets. The death of Mike Brown ushered in a new wave of activism, but the protests themselves demonstrated just how extreme police budgets and militarizations have become. Historian Elizabeth hit after Michael Brown's murder in two thousand fourteen, those m wrap armored tanks roaming through the streets of Ferguson that the Ferguson Police Department had on hand. People were stunned that local police had these weapons that were being used at the time in Afghanistan. And people said, oh, well, this is surplus military transfers from the War on Terror. No, this militarization has been happening for well over half a century. It began when Johnson called the War on Crime and six five in in large part to create a pipeline where surplus military weapons that like tear gas and m for carbine rifles and helicopters and armored tanks and and bulletproof vests, wakie talkies, all kinds of new weapons and technologies being used in Vietnam, and interventions overseas to local law enforcement to fight black rebellion At home, Where are our tax dollars going and how do they reflect what we value? As a society, author, thinker, and speaker on issues of identity and race in America in a world with finite resources, when you're being told but often the largest chunk of our funds need to go to locking up people. If your youth, if your teenagers going through a rough time and shoplifting or experimenting with some drugs, you expect to be able to call a number and get help. You expect that whoever they interact with is going to say, this is a trouble kid who needs help. You expect that if they are caught shoplifting in the stores, and we see this in TV all the time, that the store owner is gonna walk them home and say, you know what, your kids in trouble, have them show up on Tuesday and momp the floor for free. You expect that if someone you love is in mental health crisis, that you will be able to call a professional who will come and get them health and safety that they need. When we say, when my team is in trouble, what he needs is intervention, What he needs is some guidance. I need to make sure that whoever is called in sees the humanity of my child. Instead the person responding when your kids shoplifts should be trained to kill. That is not anybody who sees the value in humanity and our communities want. I think that, you know, there's so much debate around the language of defund the police. And I was talking with some friends, some colleagues of mine who have been heavily involved in this work and in times just even you know, six years ago, when we wouldn't say defund the police on a large platform, it wasn't a debate to have because people were scared of it. And now this is a debate we're having, which I think is important and I think is progress. That abolition, first and foremost is tied to the understanding that our police system are so called criminal justice system is not only a descendant, but a continued justification of the idea that those in power get to decide who has freedom and who doesn't who is redeemable and who is it based on the color of their skin, based on their disability, based on their wealth and resources of their freedom, and builds a story justifying that defund the police simply says, no, this is not what I choose my money to go to. This is not what we should be putting our resources into. We don't believe that it makes people safer. We don't believe that it's a way to live. We live in a world where people who have been denied resources do desperate things, and as long as those res persons are lacking, those desperate acts will occur. And so we say, well, what if we gave those resources, What if people weren't so desperate. There have to be a lot of different solutions from different approaches that we try. So one of the things that we did to address these issues with create a task Force on the Future of Community Policing. And this task force was outstanding because it was made up of all the different stakeholders. We had law enforcement, we had community activists, we had young people. They held public meanings across the country. They developed concrete proposals that every community in America can implement to rebuild trust and help law enforcement sociologists. Nikki Jones, I think there are good examples right now of community driven efforts to redefine safety. To think about non criminalizing ways that the govern can in fact intervene. Policing is the most coercive way in which they do that, but there are other ways that they could provide support and resources. In summer, I thought critically about how we could use the resources of the university to provide to those who are on the front lines of this battle, to to reimagine public safety, to develop community alternatives. Uh. And so what I've been able to do over working closely with a community partner to bring research, expertise and energy of students in service of building up the life affirming institutions that Abolition calls for the project not of of of perfecting policing, but but really strengthening communities and thinking about all the ways that policy can be used to do that. And so if I think about Oakland, there's a program where it trains community members in crisis response. We know one of the most volatile encounters is when police officers are interacting with people who are experiencing crisis, particularly mental health crisis. UH. And so what is it it mean to train a broader swath of the community to respond to crisis. So that's a key shift that came from this moment. UH. And there are reasons why people coalesced around that. One part is that law enforcement or certainly some law enforcement officers or leaders agreed that their skills and expertise don't align with mental health crisis. UH. And we're less resistant to other people coming in. UM to that space where you will get more pushback is with the anti violence, the violence prevention efforts, because fundamentally, the police believe that that is their domain. And so for me, when you asked me about reform arms, one of the most important is to directly confront the violence of policing UH and to constrain the ability of police to use violence and to do harm. And that is where the biggest battle is going to be because when you think about what police unions are defending, they're not necessarily defending the right of officers to respond to mental health crisis. They're responding to defending officers and their ability to use as much violence as necessary in any encounter. Well, let me just say that the police union is a lobbying arm of the police department. That's their function, basically, retired Sergeant Cheryl Dorsey, she spent twenty years in uniform and patrol on the Los Angeles Police Department between nine and two thousand and I know that some unions are stronger than others, are more pres sive in terms of really going to the mat for officers, many times errant officers. When you hear the term the blue wall of silence, really all that is is you know what the what the kids say in the street. You know, snitches get stitches, and so nobody wants to tell on somebody else, generally wholesale, because when you report misconduct, there's a price to pay, and that price could be something as simple as just being ostracized, which is a real thing. It could be something as serious as not getting back up if you ask for it. Police chiefs, sheriffs and commissioners could stop all of these errant behavior yesterday if they had an appetite to do that. You can't have a Derek Chauvin on a police department over twenty years or nearly twenty years on the department with as many personnel complaints as he had years on the job and not have anything substantively be done to him administratively to deter that bad behavior. If they wanted to, they being command staff police chiefs, if they wanted to stop the behavior, they absolutely could. Many police chiefs will say that, you know, we can't get rid of these guys because of the police unions, And that may very well be true, because officers do have a right to do process. But what a police officer is not guaranteed is to work in patrol, to be in the field. And I know this to be true from a personal position that if a watch commander, if a captain wants to take a police officer out of the field, they can do it. They can tie them to a desk for their entire career if they so chose. Just as with anything, if something is allowed to go unchecked, then it certainly has the potential to become a behemoth. Right, whether it's crime or whether it's errant officers will return after this break, we're back. This is context matters. Here is Kendrick Sampson. So I think that when we're talking about abolition in the in the world without police, people hear what we're taking away and not what the vision is the whole reason that the abolitionist movement exists is to uproot all of those things that were intended to oppress. Those systems that were built, that weren't ever held accountable, They just had a new face. Those things need to be uprooted. Just like any bad tree or weed that's causing problems in any other garden. Uh, you uproot that and you plant good seeds in that in that soil. You don't hire a violent institution to keep you safe. You institute systems that are meant for safety. That's it. I don't think it's really hard. We just have to, you know, have those conversations, start building that that narrative infrastructure for that narrative change that precedes culture, that precedes politics, that builds the infrastructure that we actually need. Me Michael Larocha t O Show, co founded Build Power to organize people in the entertainment industry and to utilize their platforms to shine a light on these incredible, extraordinary stories happening all the time that we don't hear winds happening all the time. One of the key tenants to oppression is to suppress all of that good work. To say that it's not happening. Hide it. And we're in the epicenter of the biggest narrative industry, the mecca film and television, right here in Los Angeles. Why don't we start to build a program to organize folks. And we wanted to demystify a lot of those things that people call radical um that are really just logical solutions two problems that people have been fighting for for centuries. And we want to build a powerful community that is dead set on making this world a much better place, a place that we dream of where we know that those who are currently marginalized and targeted can be centered and can thrive. And now those people that we love, those transfolks, those people who are um differently abled, who are deaf, blind, who are elderly kids, you know, black, brown, dark skin, fat, whatever their bodies look like. They are centered, they are valued, and they have the resources that they need to have autonomy over the wellness of their communities. We know that that world is possible, and we know the people that are leading that change, and we want to make sure that we introduced them to and influence Hollywood and all of the stories that are coming out of Hollywood. Because they usually perpetuate harm and we want to make sure that they perpetuate liberation. We have to change that narrative. We have to change the narratives, and we have to replace them with narratives that are true. Then you start to literally build the future that you want to see. What is the narrative around policing we're intersex race and how can we reshape it again? Did when we think of how whiteness is depicted in media, um we get to see all sorts of whiteness. We get to see the white charity worker, the white villain, you know, the complicated white identity. We get to see white children, and very rarely actually do we get to see black children being children, being more than a tragedy or a troubled youth. And it limits the ways in which we view people. It limits the ways in which black people see themselves, and absolutely limits the ways in which people who aren't black see us and what we're capable of and the range of emotions that we have and also how the world impacts us. It creates this narrative that the white experience in the United States is the default experience and if a cop isn't is a bad cop. Usually they're depicted as a lazy cop, a cop who isn't willing to do what it takes to take down the perpetrator, a coup that isn't willing to, you know, chase down that evil villain, and not the ways in which bad policing actually shows itself today, which is um police officers who are very quick to see any black or brown person learning their life as a possible threat or danger. Oh you know, I think one of the most beautiful things when I'm asked to really think about the future is acknowledging that if if you actually invest in the things that prevent crime, if you invest in the things that build healthy communities, there is no way you can actually have a police force that functions the way it does. We have severely under resource sexual educators and rate prices clinics, we have severely under resource mental health clinics, and you know, UM suicide hotlines. We have severely under resource job programs and training programs and schools. Maybe we just say we take that budget and we put it there when we take the things off the plate of cops that cops shouldn't be doing. And I don't know who I don't know any everyday people who honestly believe that someone trained to kill needs to be giving you a twenty dollar ticket when you don't can do a complete stop at it stops, or that someone trained to kill needs to be interacting with your child when they steal a pack of candy from the corner store, or someone trained to kill needs to be showing up at your door after you've been sexually assaulted. So if we said we also wanted to make sure that cops didn't kill people on mental health checks, then that means that we would have to have mental health training, that we would have to have the escalation training. It would mean that we would need to remove that deadly weapon that often escalates a scene. It means that, you know, we would have to have officers who specialize in these areas. More from Sergeant Cheryld Dorsey. Officers need to be better trained. Officers need to undergo a psychological evaluation, not just when you're hired, not just when you're involved in a deadly use of force. But I just say every two years, because police officers are exposed daily, particularly patrol officers, every day to something that is gnarly that could affect you in a way that could alter your whole core. And police officers don't self report. They're not gonna come in and ask for help because it's not sexy, because you'll be hazed, because you'll be teased. And so you have to compel officers every two years to come in and crack open their head and just look inside and if stuff is not working right, if you can fix it, fix it, and if you can't, help them onto a profession where their skill set is better suited. Because every person who wants to be the police should not be the police. They don't have the temperament. I do know that here in California, Senator Bradford is at least trying to have officers in California held accountable when they do certain things. And and it's just this side of ending qualified immunity, but it's a great baby step. We too have an ownus, We have a responsibility. Sheriffs are elected officials. District attorneys who don't want to prosecute errant officers are elected officials. Judges who don't want to give police officers a sentence commiserate with the crime that they've been convicted of are elected officials, and that just because someone runs from you, you don't get to shoot them. I've had many many suspects during my twenty years run from me. Just because somebody doesn't comply, doesn't come here, doesn't turn around, says something that you find offensive, does not give you the right to kill them. I have been in fights with people, but guess what, I shot no one in my twenty years. So I'm here to tell you I've dealt with some of the baddest badass I shot no one. So there's a way to do this job. There's a way to take bad guys and girls to jail, allow them to have their dignity and survive even in non compliance. We are not to be the judge, jury, and executioner day in and day out as we patrol the streets of the city where we're employed. I don't have a problem speaking truthfully. Um I know, depending on what I say on any given day may ruffle the feathers of activists if I'm saying something that they deem as pro police, or certainly could ruffle the feathers of the police because I'm giving away company secrets. But I don't speak the way that I do because I'm anti police, although I've been accused of that. It's been a significant amount of my life doing what it is that I do. I want to make things better, I want to make things different. And if we don't admit that there's a problem, that we have nothing to fix. Nikki Jones, how do you provide safety for that young person or or a vision that emerges from the needs of that young person, not from the needs of politicians, uh, you know, be selected or elected. It's a deep project. It's a deep project. And so the commitment has to be to opening up and to thinking differently, and I think particularly for white people, not exclusively from confronting the way that your alignment with policing is part of a racial the racial project of policing. Right, that the policing is a white institution that is based on protecting in part white people from the fear right uh, in their imaginations of black people. That's part of it. Uh. And so when you say you want more policing, and do you want more of that? Some people do and that's real, but some people don't. Uh. And if that's the case, then they need to confront that and begin working towards that I think a lot of people have been trying to figure out what the protests in They are unprecedent for a lot of us, and one of us in our lifetime, I haven't seen protesting the United States to that scale, and it was stunning to see. It was stunning to see so many people marching for black lives. It was stunning to see these conversations in the areas of society that had so long been resistant. What that will mean for us long term is to be determined. If we continuously go back to the fact that we're talking about systems, then that means that will only really be able to see the effectiveness of these protests when we see it in the systems. What I would love is for able to say, what is happening in my town, in my church, in my school, right what is happening here? I want people to be curious about why things are the way they are. How many kids of color in your school are getting the education they need, are thragning, how many are being sent to juvenile attention, how many are being expelled or suspended? How many are being put into special education when they don't have disabilities right? How often is this happening in your neighborhood, in your town. That's the comfort of the conversation of what people to have. And then I want people to ask, where have I been made a party to this? Where have I been taught and incentivized to support this? And how do I stop? And then for populations of color, especially black people, who I think have been not only, of course, have we survived so much for so many generations, but I would say even this whole discussion has been is so brutal when you're constantly asked to revisit your own trauma and humanization, in your own unsafety in the world. I think that we need to have a lot more conversations about what healing and looks like and what joy looks like. This work isn't easy. We may not always get it right. We may make mistakes along in the way, but if our intentions are aligned, we can and we will grow from those mistakes. When we come together to protests, change policy, and make demands of our leaders. We must always always nurture the ground we're standing on in the present moment, remember to celebrate each other, relish all that we're looking to protect. This episode was brought to You by Shonda land Audio and collaboration with One Up, a social justice coalition working to end police brutality. Hashtag Matter is a production of Shonda land Audio in partnership with I Heart Radio and an association with Wolf at the Door. For more podcasts from shondaland Audio, visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

Hashtag Matter is a production of Shonda Land Audio in partnership with I Heart Radio and an association with Wolf at the Door. This episode was brought to you in collaboration with One Up, a social justice coalition working to end police brutality, and there's two part documentary follow up to Hashtag Matter, will consider unexamined repercussions, joined by some of the nation's leading activists, historians, and thinkers. Maybe by contextualizing our past, we can better define our future, a future that includes an exciting new normal where we invest in resources that build safe communities and healthy kids. Listen up, your boy poo troll in the building, and this is context matters. If you haven't listened to the previous episode, I suggest you go back and listen before moving on here, because it provides incredibly important historical context that brings us to the present moment. I always say that I would love to live in a world where police are like pay phones. You know, we use them once upon a time, and now we understand them differently, and we've taken the phones into our own hands, quite literally, in our pockets. And that's what I feel like we need to do with the care and safety um that we have, we need to it needs to be brought into our communities. Kendrick Sampson, an actor and activists co founder of Build Power. Dr Molinadul always talks about you know how when she first moved to l A, she realized that every morning, all of these what we would call old heads, elders would come out and sit on the porch and it was like clockwork, seven o'clock every day or something like that, and she couldn't understand what was happening. And finally she asked, and she said, the elder said, that's when the kids go to school. That's their safety system, and they sit and they watch. We don't need cops. What I saw was a very beautiful, nurturing, airing system that worked. Nobody was gonna mess with these babies while the elders were watching. And there are systems like that that we can create. Even that's happening. I think in Baton Rouge, where there was a school where forty five dads got together and and um fights and suspensions and all of that went way way, way way way down because they knew they had people that they respected and their dads and such watching so and they did it in shifts. So and I'm not saying that everyday people need to take even more out of their time. We can have those resources. Those resources now are tied up in astronomical budgets, and those budgets are forty of all of the resources we have in our city budgets. The death of Mike Brown ushered in a new wave of activism, but the protests themselves demonstrated just how extreme police budgets and militarizations have become. Historian Elizabeth hit after Michael Brown's murder in two thousand fourteen, those m wrap armored tanks roaming through the streets of Ferguson that the Ferguson Police Department had on hand. People were stunned that local police had these weapons that were being used at the time in Afghanistan. And people said, oh, well, this is surplus military transfers from the War on Terror. No, this militarization has been happening for well over half a century. It began when Johnson called the War on Crime and six five in in large part to create a pipeline where surplus military weapons that like tear gas and m for carbine rifles and helicopters and armored tanks and and bulletproof vests, wakie talkies, all kinds of new weapons and technologies being used in Vietnam, and interventions overseas to local law enforcement to fight black rebellion At home, Where are our tax dollars going and how do they reflect what we value? As a society, author, thinker, and speaker on issues of identity and race in America in a world with finite resources, when you're being told but often the largest chunk of our funds need to go to locking up people. If your youth, if your teenagers going through a rough time and shoplifting or experimenting with some drugs, you expect to be able to call a number and get help. You expect that whoever they interact with is going to say, this is a trouble kid who needs help. You expect that if they are caught shoplifting in the stores, and we see this in TV all the time, that the store owner is gonna walk them home and say, you know what, your kids in trouble, have them show up on Tuesday and momp the floor for free. You expect that if someone you love is in mental health crisis, that you will be able to call a professional who will come and get them health and safety that they need. When we say, when my team is in trouble, what he needs is intervention, What he needs is some guidance. I need to make sure that whoever is called in sees the humanity of my child. Instead the person responding when your kids shoplifts should be trained to kill. That is not anybody who sees the value in humanity and our communities want. I think that, you know, there's so much debate around the language of defund the police. And I was talking with some friends, some colleagues of mine who have been heavily involved in this work and in times just even you know, six years ago, when we wouldn't say defund the police on a large platform, it wasn't a debate to have because people were scared of it. And now this is a debate we're having, which I think is important and I think is progress. That abolition, first and foremost is tied to the understanding that our police system are so called criminal justice system is not only a descendant, but a continued justification of the idea that those in power get to decide who has freedom and who doesn't who is redeemable and who is it based on the color of their skin, based on their disability, based on their wealth and resources of their freedom, and builds a story justifying that defund the police simply says, no, this is not what I choose my money to go to. This is not what we should be putting our resources into. We don't believe that it makes people safer. We don't believe that it's a way to live. We live in a world where people who have been denied resources do desperate things, and as long as those res persons are lacking, those desperate acts will occur. And so we say, well, what if we gave those resources, What if people weren't so desperate. There have to be a lot of different solutions from different approaches that we try. So one of the things that we did to address these issues with create a task Force on the Future of Community Policing. And this task force was outstanding because it was made up of all the different stakeholders. We had law enforcement, we had community activists, we had young people. They held public meanings across the country. They developed concrete proposals that every community in America can implement to rebuild trust and help law enforcement sociologists. Nikki Jones, I think there are good examples right now of community driven efforts to redefine safety. To think about non criminalizing ways that the govern can in fact intervene. Policing is the most coercive way in which they do that, but there are other ways that they could provide support and resources. In summer, I thought critically about how we could use the resources of the university to provide to those who are on the front lines of this battle, to to reimagine public safety, to develop community alternatives. Uh. And so what I've been able to do over working closely with a community partner to bring research, expertise and energy of students in service of building up the life affirming institutions that Abolition calls for the project not of of of perfecting policing, but but really strengthening communities and thinking about all the ways that policy can be used to do that. And so if I think about Oakland, there's a program where it trains community members in crisis response. We know one of the most volatile encounters is when police officers are interacting with people who are experiencing crisis, particularly mental health crisis. UH. And so what is it it mean to train a broader swath of the community to respond to crisis. So that's a key shift that came from this moment. UH. And there are reasons why people coalesced around that. One part is that law enforcement or certainly some law enforcement officers or leaders agreed that their skills and expertise don't align with mental health crisis. UH. And we're less resistant to other people coming in. UM to that space where you will get more pushback is with the anti violence, the violence prevention efforts, because fundamentally, the police believe that that is their domain. And so for me, when you asked me about reform arms, one of the most important is to directly confront the violence of policing UH and to constrain the ability of police to use violence and to do harm. And that is where the biggest battle is going to be because when you think about what police unions are defending, they're not necessarily defending the right of officers to respond to mental health crisis. They're responding to defending officers and their ability to use as much violence as necessary in any encounter. Well, let me just say that the police union is a lobbying arm of the police department. That's their function, basically, retired Sergeant Cheryl Dorsey, she spent twenty years in uniform and patrol on the Los Angeles Police Department between nine and two thousand and I know that some unions are stronger than others, are more pres sive in terms of really going to the mat for officers, many times errant officers. When you hear the term the blue wall of silence, really all that is is you know what the what the kids say in the street. You know, snitches get stitches, and so nobody wants to tell on somebody else, generally wholesale, because when you report misconduct, there's a price to pay, and that price could be something as simple as just being ostracized, which is a real thing. It could be something as serious as not getting back up if you ask for it. Police chiefs, sheriffs and commissioners could stop all of these errant behavior yesterday if they had an appetite to do that. You can't have a Derek Chauvin on a police department over twenty years or nearly twenty years on the department with as many personnel complaints as he had years on the job and not have anything substantively be done to him administratively to deter that bad behavior. If they wanted to, they being command staff police chiefs, if they wanted to stop the behavior, they absolutely could. Many police chiefs will say that, you know, we can't get rid of these guys because of the police unions, And that may very well be true, because officers do have a right to do process. But what a police officer is not guaranteed is to work in patrol, to be in the field. And I know this to be true from a personal position that if a watch commander, if a captain wants to take a police officer out of the field, they can do it. They can tie them to a desk for their entire career if they so chose. Just as with anything, if something is allowed to go unchecked, then it certainly has the potential to become a behemoth. Right, whether it's crime or whether it's errant officers will return after this break, we're back. This is context matters. Here is Kendrick Sampson. So I think that when we're talking about abolition in the in the world without police, people hear what we're taking away and not what the vision is the whole reason that the abolitionist movement exists is to uproot all of those things that were intended to oppress. Those systems that were built, that weren't ever held accountable, They just had a new face. Those things need to be uprooted. Just like any bad tree or weed that's causing problems in any other garden. Uh, you uproot that and you plant good seeds in that in that soil. You don't hire a violent institution to keep you safe. You institute systems that are meant for safety. That's it. I don't think it's really hard. We just have to, you know, have those conversations, start building that that narrative infrastructure for that narrative change that precedes culture, that precedes politics, that builds the infrastructure that we actually need. Me Michael Larocha t O Show, co founded Build Power to organize people in the entertainment industry and to utilize their platforms to shine a light on these incredible, extraordinary stories happening all the time that we don't hear winds happening all the time. One of the key tenants to oppression is to suppress all of that good work. To say that it's not happening. Hide it. And we're in the epicenter of the biggest narrative industry, the mecca film and television, right here in Los Angeles. Why don't we start to build a program to organize folks. And we wanted to demystify a lot of those things that people call radical um that are really just logical solutions two problems that people have been fighting for for centuries. And we want to build a powerful community that is dead set on making this world a much better place, a place that we dream of where we know that those who are currently marginalized and targeted can be centered and can thrive. And now those people that we love, those transfolks, those people who are um differently abled, who are deaf, blind, who are elderly kids, you know, black, brown, dark skin, fat, whatever their bodies look like. They are centered, they are valued, and they have the resources that they need to have autonomy over the wellness of their communities. We know that that world is possible, and we know the people that are leading that change, and we want to make sure that we introduced them to and influence Hollywood and all of the stories that are coming out of Hollywood. Because they usually perpetuate harm and we want to make sure that they perpetuate liberation. We have to change that narrative. We have to change the narratives, and we have to replace them with narratives that are true. Then you start to literally build the future that you want to see. What is the narrative around policing we're intersex race and how can we reshape it again? Did when we think of how whiteness is depicted in media, um we get to see all sorts of whiteness. We get to see the white charity worker, the white villain, you know, the complicated white identity. We get to see white children, and very rarely actually do we get to see black children being children, being more than a tragedy or a troubled youth. And it limits the ways in which we view people. It limits the ways in which black people see themselves, and absolutely limits the ways in which people who aren't black see us and what we're capable of and the range of emotions that we have and also how the world impacts us. It creates this narrative that the white experience in the United States is the default experience and if a cop isn't is a bad cop. Usually they're depicted as a lazy cop, a cop who isn't willing to do what it takes to take down the perpetrator, a coup that isn't willing to, you know, chase down that evil villain, and not the ways in which bad policing actually shows itself today, which is um police officers who are very quick to see any black or brown person learning their life as a possible threat or danger. Oh you know, I think one of the most beautiful things when I'm asked to really think about the future is acknowledging that if if you actually invest in the things that prevent crime, if you invest in the things that build healthy communities, there is no way you can actually have a police force that functions the way it does. We have severely under resource sexual educators and rate prices clinics, we have severely under resource mental health clinics, and you know, UM suicide hotlines. We have severely under resource job programs and training programs and schools. Maybe we just say we take that budget and we put it there when we take the things off the plate of cops that cops shouldn't be doing. And I don't know who I don't know any everyday people who honestly believe that someone trained to kill needs to be giving you a twenty dollar ticket when you don't can do a complete stop at it stops, or that someone trained to kill needs to be interacting with your child when they steal a pack of candy from the corner store, or someone trained to kill needs to be showing up at your door after you've been sexually assaulted. So if we said we also wanted to make sure that cops didn't kill people on mental health checks, then that means that we would have to have mental health training, that we would have to have the escalation training. It would mean that we would need to remove that deadly weapon that often escalates a scene. It means that, you know, we would have to have officers who specialize in these areas. More from Sergeant Cheryld Dorsey. Officers need to be better trained. Officers need to undergo a psychological evaluation, not just when you're hired, not just when you're involved in a deadly use of force. But I just say every two years, because police officers are exposed daily, particularly patrol officers, every day to something that is gnarly that could affect you in a way that could alter your whole core. And police officers don't self report. They're not gonna come in and ask for help because it's not sexy, because you'll be hazed, because you'll be teased. And so you have to compel officers every two years to come in and crack open their head and just look inside and if stuff is not working right, if you can fix it, fix it, and if you can't, help them onto a profession where their skill set is better suited. Because every person who wants to be the police should not be the police. They don't have the temperament. I do know that here in California, Senator Bradford is at least trying to have officers in California held accountable when they do certain things. And and it's just this side of ending qualified immunity, but it's a great baby step. We too have an ownus, We have a responsibility. Sheriffs are elected officials. District attorneys who don't want to prosecute errant officers are elected officials. Judges who don't want to give police officers a sentence commiserate with the crime that they've been convicted of are elected officials, and that just because someone runs from you, you don't get to shoot them. I've had many many suspects during my twenty years run from me. Just because somebody doesn't comply, doesn't come here, doesn't turn around, says something that you find offensive, does not give you the right to kill them. I have been in fights with people, but guess what, I shot no one in my twenty years. So I'm here to tell you I've dealt with some of the baddest badass I shot no one. So there's a way to do this job. There's a way to take bad guys and girls to jail, allow them to have their dignity and survive even in non compliance. We are not to be the judge, jury, and executioner day in and day out as we patrol the streets of the city where we're employed. I don't have a problem speaking truthfully. Um I know, depending on what I say on any given day may ruffle the feathers of activists if I'm saying something that they deem as pro police, or certainly could ruffle the feathers of the police because I'm giving away company secrets. But I don't speak the way that I do because I'm anti police, although I've been accused of that. It's been a significant amount of my life doing what it is that I do. I want to make things better, I want to make things different. And if we don't admit that there's a problem, that we have nothing to fix. Nikki Jones, how do you provide safety for that young person or or a vision that emerges from the needs of that young person, not from the needs of politicians, uh, you know, be selected or elected. It's a deep project. It's a deep project. And so the commitment has to be to opening up and to thinking differently, and I think particularly for white people, not exclusively from confronting the way that your alignment with policing is part of a racial the racial project of policing. Right, that the policing is a white institution that is based on protecting in part white people from the fear right uh, in their imaginations of black people. That's part of it. Uh. And so when you say you want more policing, and do you want more of that? Some people do and that's real, but some people don't. Uh. And if that's the case, then they need to confront that and begin working towards that I think a lot of people have been trying to figure out what the protests in They are unprecedent for a lot of us, and one of us in our lifetime, I haven't seen protesting the United States to that scale, and it was stunning to see. It was stunning to see so many people marching for black lives. It was stunning to see these conversations in the areas of society that had so long been resistant. What that will mean for us long term is to be determined. If we continuously go back to the fact that we're talking about systems, then that means that will only really be able to see the effectiveness of these protests when we see it in the systems. What I would love is for able to say, what is happening in my town, in my church, in my school, right what is happening here? I want people to be curious about why things are the way they are. How many kids of color in your school are getting the education they need, are thragning, how many are being sent to juvenile attention, how many are being expelled or suspended? How many are being put into special education when they don't have disabilities right? How often is this happening in your neighborhood, in your town. That's the comfort of the conversation of what people to have. And then I want people to ask, where have I been made a party to this? Where have I been taught and incentivized to support this? And how do I stop? And then for populations of color, especially black people, who I think have been not only, of course, have we survived so much for so many generations, but I would say even this whole discussion has been is so brutal when you're constantly asked to revisit your own trauma and humanization, in your own unsafety in the world. I think that we need to have a lot more conversations about what healing and looks like and what joy looks like. This work isn't easy. We may not always get it right. We may make mistakes along in the way, but if our intentions are aligned, we can and we will grow from those mistakes. When we come together to protests, change policy, and make demands of our leaders. We must always always nurture the ground we're standing on in the present moment, remember to celebrate each other, relish all that we're looking to protect. This episode was brought to You by Shonda land Audio and collaboration with One Up, a social justice coalition working to end police brutality. Hashtag Matter is a production of Shonda land Audio in partnership with I Heart Radio and an association with Wolf at the Door. For more podcasts from shondaland Audio, visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.